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This site is the inspiration of a former reporter/photographer for one of New England's largest daily newspapers and for various magazines. The intent is to direct readers to interesting political articles, and we urge you to visit the source sites. Any comments may be noted on site or directed to KarisChaf at gmail.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Over the last several weeks, reading news of disorder and upheaval from
Venezuela to the Levant to Ukraine to Iraq to Afghanistan, I have
thought often of a poem written almost a century ago. Thomas Hardy
composed “The Convergence of the Twain” in memory of the sinking of the Titanic.
It was published in 1915, three years after the great ship made contact
with the deadly iceberg, but reading it today one cannot help
experiencing its timelessness, cannot help sharing in its tragic sense
of fate.
....

Watching the strange mix of clumsiness and insouciance with which
Barack Obama and John Kerry approach the world, the abstract and aloof
manner in which they comment and posture on foreign affairs, it is hard
not to recall Hardy’s metaphor of growing dangers distant from the
center of civilization. The recent news of a possible terrorist plot against airliners flying to the United States, and of a threat against the U.S. embassy in Uganda,
remind us of the durability of the ideology and menace of Islamic
terrorism. The ability of non-monarchical Arab governments to control
their populations has collapsed, creating an arc of stateless space that
begins in Libya and Egypt, is briefly interrupted by the tiny,
embattled, belittled, and bullied Jewish State, and extends through
Lebanon into Syria and western Iraq.

This is our iceberg. Within its confines murderers and barbarians
roam, butchering each other and anyone else who is caught in the
crossfire. Within its confines followers of al Qaeda gather and plot.
They will not remain within its confines for long, though. Anyone who
pays the least attention to the articles inside the New York Times will have noticed leaks by officers of our intelligence agencies, leaks desperately warning that the jihadists have turned their eyes to Europe and to the United States. It is no secret. At the end of last month the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that al Qaeda is no less of a threat than it was when it attacked in 2001.

Our response? The United States has no influence in Egypt, it has
left the Syrian dictator more secure, it has left him with his stash of
WMD, and it has no pull over Lebanon, no pull over Iraq. The United
States is gutting its military, it is pursuing negotiations with Iran
whose only point is, in the words of one former Obama official, to “buy time.”
It is withdrawing from Afghanistan and leaving it in the hands of the
former hosts of al Qaeda, and it is lifting asylum restrictions to make it easier for Syrians with “loose ties” to terrorism to migrate here.

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